Gillian Feeley-Harnik

Communities of blood : The natural history of kinship in nineteenth-century America

The A. reevaluates Lewis Henry Morgan and his work, seeing his pioneering anthropological kinship studies and his researchs on the beaver as aspects of a unitary vision comprehending the landscapes and its inhabitants. She proposes a natural history of kinship, the aim of which its to break out of the box which Durkheim built and David Schneider dismantled, in the critique of Morgans supposed biological notion of kinship: the impossible project of asserting that kinship is purely social, abstracting humans from their landscapes, their animals relatives, their bodies. She finds that Morgans ideas of relationships were more linguistic and social than physiological, but also entangled with a wide range of geological and zoological phenomena, earthy and watery. Understanding his work in his own terms, his example may inspire us to search for new ways to integrate phenomenological, political-economic, and ecological analysis into the sudy of how people understand their life processes.

The King's Men in Madagascar: slavery, citizenship and Sakalava monarchy

The ‘great songs’ ( antsa maventy ) with which Sakalava praise their royalty extol them as unique and precious beings in whom all wealth in persons and things is, or eventually will be, concentrated, causing them to grow enormously and inexhaustibly fat, yet ever greedy for more. Solely because of their ancestry, their houses will be royal residences, their hats will be royal headdresses with special names. Above all, their people will be human beings owing allegiance only to monarchy, labouring only for monarchy. There may be indifferent or unwilling ones, as well as those who are eager to pay homage to the royal ancestors, but ultimately royalty will possess them all: ‘Royalty enslaves, royalty enslaves, royalty enslaves . . .’.

Spiritual Kinship in an Age of Dissent: Pigeon Fanciers in Darwin’s England

This chapter examines changing ideas of religion, kinship, and science among a historical community of pigeon fanciers in London who contributed to Charles Darwin’s research on reproduction. These Dissenters mobilized antisectarian religious ideals to serve universalizing scientific inquiries some hoped might elucidate the plan of Creation. Drawing on moral convictions about truth and trust common to their evaluations of birds and breeders, they formed close friendships counted as kinship in England and preserved in the language of the King James Bible. Feeley-Harnik considers why Darwin chose a bird exemplifying spirituality to make scientific arguments about the kinship of all creatures.